Yesterday I scanned the MSM news. The UK openly boasted of running aerial surveillance over Gaza to identify targets for Israel, and it was revealed the USA has provided over 12,000 bombs and 57,000 shells to Israel. Israel killed over 300 more civilians, including over 100 more dead children. At the same time, Kamala Harris had been sobered up long enough to make a speech claiming that the US wished Israel to avoid casualties, in a desperate attempt to mask the blood on the hands of Genocide Joe.
I read that Germany is in budget crisis. I looked thorugh numerous articles, and not a single one mentioned the actual cause of the crisis, the war in Ukraine and in particular the destruction of Nordstream. None of the MSM has ever apologised for their coordinated and unanimous “big lie” that Russia blew up its own pipeline, even though they have all now quietly abandoned this in favour of a fallback lie that it was a heroic “Dad’s Army” attack by a few Ukrainians on a little boat.
I saw the media reporting without criticism, as indeed heroic, a speech by Zelensky in which he claimed as a victory that Ukraine had not actually lost significant territory during its counter-offensive. I found nothing explaining the causes of the war and very little on the inevitable need for a negotiated solution.
I read articles about immigrants drowning while trying to reach Spain, about an EU/Switzerland agreement being stymied over fears of immigration, about immigrants on the Russia/Finland border and about the causes of anti-immigration riots in Ireland. Not one of these articles mentioned that the great wave of immigration to Europe these past twenty years has been directly caused by the destruction of whole societies, economies and national infrastructures by Western invasions and direct or proxy attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Syria.
I saw the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court shuttled around Israel and the West Bank in a fleet of armored Toyotas, looking like the most arrogant of VIPs, while refusing to act against Israel and seeking to “bothsides” the genocide unfolding before our eyes.
I realised that Karim Khan KC, brother of an ex Tory MP, himself should by rights be charged with complicity in war crimes.
The evil of the times in which we live has been clear for a very long time. In “developed” countries we have seen a massive growth in disparity of wealth and increasing numbers of people unable to lead a standard of life which makes them a part of society, in consequence of destruction of worker rights and institutional protections. We have seen an increasingly unapologetic tendency of Western neo-imperialism to unleash the devastating power of modern weaponry upon less developed nations, generally of the Islamic faith, with no care for civilian casualties.
We saw it in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and now we see its apotheosis in Gaza.
Here the two strands of dystopian western and domestic policy intertwine, because there is massive popular opposition to the genocide in Gaza, and it is crystal plain that the people of the “democracies” have no actual influence on the war machine. The war machine controls the people, they do not control the war machine. If you want to look for a sign of hope – and we all need hope – it is that a whole new generation of young people has come to understand that.
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Imagine if Russia intentionally targeted small ukrainan children killing them in the thousands, dropped bombs on them, repeatedly, just imagine the uproar – rightfully – by the west. Or just imagine if Russia would raid and attack hospitals systematically, where thousands need extensive care, and make babies in incubators die on their watch.
Death list from Gaza up until november: Most of the killed are five-year-olds
https://www.turkiyenewspaper.com/politics/17314
https://www.instagram.com/p/Czkqdv0tKAf/
Just read that, median age is 5. And they are killing those in the thousands!
And today Israel threatened the southern Gaza with same obliteration as they carried out in the north, the goal is of course to force Egypt to open the gates.
Operation in south Gaza will be ‘no less powerful’ than in north – IDF
Israel seeking to achieve “no less results” with attack on the southern part of the Palestinian enclave, IDF chief of staff says
https://swentr.site/news/588442-powerful-south-gaza-operation/
I have been critical of western/US wars (and Russia in Ukraine for that matter) but I have never seen this nasty, vile, sadistic warfare until now committed by Israel – they are not even pretending to follow the law. This is certainly something else. You have to go back to spanish/italian/german fascist regimes to compare with this inhuman slaughter of people in Gaza. It’s like evil, depraved, degenerative behavior and on top of that manipulative, they lie and deceive constantly, they seems to be devoid of any humanitarian soul, emotions.
Why on earth are western media for example constantly inviting israeli gov. reps, military reps. to spew their propaganda live on television??
And as much sickening that is happening, still no one move, one would expect a mass pushback, a mass exodus of dissenting people in high places (like Craig Mokhiber), a change of course by arab leaders, by the west – but nothing is happening – it is like a conspiracy of silence between the West+Israel+Arab leaders – the goal is set, add to that the heinous thing called social media where dehumanizing goes on daily, it is a friggin’ sewer where racism and cheering on killing of palestinians is normalized and just today a popular parody account mocking Netanyahu was banned by Elon Musk.
https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1730807343485497751 [ nitter ]
What is perhaps most sad to see is the multiple jewish/pro-israeli groups/individuals defending Israel and mocking and humiliate palestinians, apparently the whole “never again” only applies to themselves and then they wonder why antisemitism is, allegedly, on the rise. Well if you openly support a regime that slaughter children, what do you expect, especially tying that killing to your ethnicity/religion? That people will cheer you on, applaud you? Some chutzpah alright.
Where are the humanitarian, progressive jewish voices that one so often see in the western political discourse now?
Lets say there was a war by white people against people of color, and the white people committed heinous crimes against the black and you would have majority of white lobbying groups that openly support the killing. Would not that position by white people generate racism against themselves and that with good grounds?
Everywhere I look I see an almost universally unidirectional flow of people towards those countries that supposedly are heinously racist, genocidal, etc.
It is extraordinarily difficult to reconcile the mass population movements towards the EU, the UK, the USA, etc. with the continuously repeated allegations of our genocidal complicity.
There’s a massive cognitive dissonance in there somewhere.
But, Johnny boy, what’s obviously happening (?) is that the oppressed peoples want to get on board the Death Star because they know they will be safer within the busom of the beast than outside in the death zone where everyone is at risk. Can you see the logic in that ?
John
I don’t see why you see a contradiction. Perhaps I’m missing something, but if the US, for example, is being genocidal, it is acting so towards other peoples and not towards its own people. So why should people be put off from trying to enter the US?
One could also argue – following on from the above – that those immigrants would feel safer in the US than in their own countries for the reason stated above.
Am I missing something, John? If so, grateful if you would would show me the true light.
Yeah, the western death squads don’t operate in the capital.
Just as plenty of refugees fled towards the Third Reich as the walls started to close in.
The British and Europeans should not flatter themselves.
If the US was 20 miles away most refugees would want to go there.
Why?
Because unlike in the flattened wrecked and smashe dup ruined countries they flee from there is actual work and work equals pay and pay equals money.
Money which is sent back home to help their relatives survive in the countries that thw West wrecked in order to install ‘ Democracy
The same ‘ Democracy ‘ that even the Israelis were protesting about prior to the so called ‘ War’
If you haven’t noticed ( my advice is for you to watch more television – not less) tehn you should have realised by now that democracy in the Civilised West is on its arse.
Germany’s arse is the nearest to the floor as industrial production is down by at least 7%
Therby making the slavish following of the ‘ Civilised ‘ USA in foreign policy not just shooting yourself in the foot but using a machine gun to do it.
Sadly the British Values you and others subscribe to are rapidly become valuelesss.
There have bee many Slave Revolts in history but most of the brave revolters where not white.
John, you seem to have missed the whole point of Craig’s message. These people are not fleeing to us, as moths to a flame; they are fleeing from the areas that have become hostile to them due to unwelcome regime change or strategic purpose in some future war.
As James Baldwin once put it, “…who, without the most tremendous coercion, coercion indistinguishable from despair, would ever have crossed the frightening ocean to come to this desolate place?”
Can I ask though, what did the Hamas attackers expect to happen as a consequence of their attack on Israeli Jewish men, women and children? What did their supporters expect (active supporters I guess, not those who just desperately needed their welfare services funded by whoever for whatever motive, mostly foreign islamic organisations I think I read but not sure).
Were the hostages taken in order to exchange for their friends and family in Israeli jails. What revenge attacks did they war game?
By comparison the Kurdish PKK policy I understand has been to not attack civilians, but military (which can include militarised police I think). The Turkish state has I gather been complicit in extrajudicial kidnappings, not to mention the judicial shellings of villages and imprisoning of politicians when they do well at the ballot.
It *was* a military rout of one of the world’s most powerful armies, in large part using homemade weapons. Israel’s starvation and bombing of children since then is just a degenerate attempt to cover up that humiliation and to show that its military really is tough. Their indiscriminate bombing shows they have no interest in the safety of hostages, whether they be men, women or children. These US transplants are also using the humiliation of October 7th as justification to remove millions more natives of Palestine from their homeland. Outside predictable quarters there is scant respect or sympathy for Israel’s actions.
GreatedApe
Regardless of what Hamas did, Israel have no right to do what they do now so Hamas probably did not even count in this development that followed upon 7th of october.
From what I know Hamas intent was to target israeli military and take hostages so I do not think they planned for the atrocities that did happen, The operation went awry. When Hamas broke through the gates a whole lot of individuals joined in and on top of that Hamas did not knew about the music festival at all.
The people that flooded into Israel were of course filled with hatred, they have lived under occupation, blockade and suppression for decades, they have seen their relatives being slaughtered or humiliated by israeli troops with the full support of the outside world, they are poor, no jobs, no future living in one of the most densely populated regions on earth – one could go crazy for less. I do not think one should be surprised of what did happen, these are desperate people.
Norman Finkelstein have compared the event with Slave rebellion and Ghetto uprisings.
Hamas must have known something like this was about to happen. They know that for Israel it’s always been about ‘mowing the grass’. About ‘correcting’ the problem that due to their far worse living conditions, Palestinians have more children than Israelis, even taking the child-rich ultra-orthodox families into account.
The goal of Hamas was no doubt to cause a crisis that puts the conflict back on the agenda, rather than just continue waiting it out and having only a few hundred civilians slaughtered every year, and many others imprisoned and tortured, while the West Bank gets taken over by illegal settlers at an increasing pace.
“The people that flooded into Israel were of course filled with hatred, they have lived under occupation, blockade and suppression for decades, they have seen their relatives being slaughtered or humiliated by israeli troops with the full support of the outside world, they are poor, no jobs, no future living in one of the most densely populated regions on earth – one could go crazy for less. I do not think one should be surprised of what did happen, these are desperate people.”
There is no “of course” about it, it is pure speculation: there is no evidence, apart from the “evidence” provided by the IDF, that the Palestinian attackers committed any atrocities against civilians. There is, however, eyewitness evidence from Israeli civilians, that the IDF attacked the Hamas fighters from afar, killing invaders and civilians alike. Why are you supporting the Zionists by recycling their lies?
thank you, when people repeat this stuff they are unknowingly accepting the Israeli propaganda.
I read that HAMAS did not attack civilians until Baruch Goldstein changed the rules
Jack (22.00): 5 is the modal (most abundant) age, not the median (age than which 50% of the killed are older and 50% younger). Still shocking.
Jack, What was Russia to do after 14000 Russian speaking people had been slaughtered in East Ukraine since 2014 by Western Ukrainians? Putin tried ceasefires, he tried 3 Minsk Agreements, he tried several approaches to the US to reach an agreement over the re-establishment of internal laws on Russia’s right to border security. He was rebuffed and ignored at every turn. In the final week before the onset of the SMO, Azov battalion’s increased their attacks on Donetsk to a level unknown before.
The clearest enunciation I have seen so far as to how far the electorates of Western ‘democracies’ have had their actual wills ignored and trampled upon by their entirely misnamed ‘representatives’.
‘Representatives’ who are in fact morally bereft emotional husks. A condition they have arrived at by a combination of corruption and power obsession, perhaps by fast route public school programming but also achievable in other ways.
Sadly, IMV, they no longer qualify for the designation ‘human beings’.
It is a lose lose scenario. Not only do the ‘underlings’ suffer by the lack of resources they require to achieve their full human potential but those who lord it over them also suffer by not achieving THEIR full human potential either (although they may not realise that until, perhaps, a drink sodden or mental breakdown episode much later in life).
Our ‘elite’ justifies their actions by telling themselves that they know what’s best and that we (i.e. everyone else) can’t handle the truth.
The real truth is THEY would not recognise the truth if it jumped up and bit them on the arse.
btw Eric Zuesse on The Duran blog is quoting Craig Murray from Oct. 2022 extensively with the Anti-Semitism/Corbyn post
“Britain’s Fake ‘Democracy’ Has Now Collapsed”
https://theduran.com/britains-fake-democracy-has-now-collapsed/
What I find dystopian is also how the parties that during the Cold war tirelessly fought for peace and against nuclear weapons and so on are now in the driver’s seat in the escalation of war.
Just take Germany where Socialists and Greens rule and they became neo-con warhawks just like that!
EU needs its own nuclear weapons – ex-German FM
Green politician Joschka Fischer cited the need to deter Russia and added that the bloc should also invest in air defenses
https://swentr.site/news/588429-ex-german-fm-fischer-eu-needs-nukes/
It seems like Socialists, Greens and unfortunately many to the left throughout the west, have bought into some kind of false right-wing conscience, mimicking the rhetoric of the hardline right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
I think the explanation is easier. The German federal elections were very suspicious. Think about the following facts:
– We know from ‘Cablegate’ that American diplomats were very unhappy about the fact that Angela Merkel could not be manipulated.
– Angela Merkel retired from politics in 2021, so it was clear that there would be a new chancellor. A big chance for the Americans!
– From at least 2015, Israeli contractor ‘Team Jorge’ was active manipulating elections for undisclosed parties in various countries. Due to a 2022 sting operation we know about some African countries where they operated. If they were also active in the UK or Germany, we would probably not know about this.
– The Christian Democrats (Angela Merkel’s party) for some reason was unable to come up with a single candidate who had a chance to be elected.
– The Social Democrats had similar problems, but suddenly pushed a very unlikely candidate: Olaf Scholz, an exceptionally boring and uninspiring person except for the following two scandals that likely make him susceptible to blackmail by any secret service that has incriminating information on him.
– In 2001, as Interior Senator of the state of Hamburg, Olaf Scholz had allowed the inhuman and obviously unconstitutional practice of forcing emetics into the throats of suspected drug dealers. As every reasonable person expected, this soon led to a death. (Achidi John, supposedly from Cameroon, who was really Michael Paul Nwabuisi from Nigeria.) In a later similar case in which the victim survived, Germany was convicted for torture by the European Court of Human Rights in 2006.
– In the early 2010s, there a wide-spread practice of fraud in Germany was to use a variant of dividend stripping to get double reimbursements for tax payments. Although this practice was obviously criminal, many German banks considered it technically legal and supported their client’s participation in this scheme. When the courts put a stop to this and the banks were faced with massive demands for paying back improper reimbursements, something very strange happened. In 2016, the revenue office of the state of Hamburg demanded 47 million Euros from private bank MM Warburg for the year 2009 alone. After three meetings with Olaf Scholz, who by then was first mayor of Hamburg, the revenue office suddenly decided it didn’t want the money, after all. The meetings only became known because the diaries of the bank’s owner were found in a raid. Olaf Scholz claims, very implausibly, that he has no recollection whatsoever of these meetings.
– Both these scandals, which should have disqualified Scholz, were publicly known at the time he became a candidate. For some reason the German media all agreed at the time that this was nothing worth talking about.
– At a press conference during his first visit to the US, Scholz stood next to Biden when Biden declared that in case of war in Ukraine, the US would find a way to put a stop to Nord Stream 2. Nord Stream 2 had been an area of significant conflict between the US and Germany because it was of vital economic interest to Germany as well as ensuring peace with powerful almost-neighbour Russia, while the US has a long-term project to destabilize Russia and tried to coax Germany into buying its expensive fracking oil. Nevertheless, Scholz did not protest.
– After the Nord Stream bombing, the German government and mainstream media jumped on the ludicrous narrative that Russia did it and painted everything else as conspiracy theories. The German government continues to hide its knowledge from the German parliament.
– Due to the loss of the cheap gas that had caused an economic boom, the German economy went into a recession. Oddly, nobody talks about this connection.
– Since the bombing, Germany has built two expensive terminals for accepting fracking gas from the US. No protest from the Greens, who are in government.
– It is now known that the bombing was executed by Ukrainian forces (which is inconceivable without the support or at the very least green light from the US). Not a single word of complaint against Ukraine or the US from the German government. No comments about this in the German mainstream media. No talk about reducing or ending the massive German support for Ukraine’s war effort, even now that the government has run into legal problems raising money. Instead, Germany is now increasing support for Israel as well.
– Serious, unconstitutional restrictions to freedom of opinion when it comes to Israel’s genocide, which is actively supported by the German government.
My conclusion is that the US ran a successful regime change operation during the 2021 German federal elections, putting Olaf Scholz and his ministers in place as their puppets. Probably via ‘Team Jorge’ or a similar contractor. Of course we can’t be certain, but it seems very, very likely.
It tends to be overlooked that neither Nordsteam was pumping any gas at the time of the sabotage. The supply through Nordstream 1 was restricted by Russia during 2022 then shut off completely at the end of August. Nordstream 2 was never commissioned, it was supposed to have happened in the spring of 2022 but was shelved by the German government after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The idea that a gang of renegade Ukrainians could’ve conducted the operation from an 11 metre yacht is absurd. It was a 75 metre dive and a total of 400 kg of explosives were used. Not a job for amateurs and something which would’ve required a lot of specialist equipment.
On the other hand the Danish navy photographed the 4,500 ton Russian salvage ship SS-750 in the area four days previously.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-military-ship-spotted-near-nord-stream-pipelines-days-before-blast/
This vessel is fully equipped for deep sea dives and carries a minisub, an ideal choice.
oh so the Russians blew up their own pipeline which wasn’t pumping any gas. you ignore the obvious suspect, the US. why?
Because the US president explicitly said he would never do such a thing and because the last nation whose interests have benefited from the attack is the USA. (Esp not its big fracking corporations who bankrolled Biden’s presidential campaign.)
the US is the biggest beneficary of blowing up the pipeline. it gets to sell LNG to Europe at inflated prices. i dont remember Biden saying the US would not blow up the pipeline, I remember him promising to stop it.
Pears: Germany ‘shelved’ its involvement in Nord Stream 2 on 22 February 2022, so 2 days before (not ‘after’) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Pears
please don´t tell us you are still convinced that the Russians blew up that thing while as well knowing that Victoria Nuland in open public admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
“I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
That makes absolutely zero sense.
a few more telling quotes on NS2
“(To stop the energy cooperation between Europe and Russia) A first step would involve stopping Nord Stream-2,” then US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo in 2020.
“There is still time to stop it…Kill Nord Stream 2 now, and let it rust beneath the waves of the Baltic.” — US senator, Tom Cotton in 2021
“We have made clear to the Russians that pipeline is at risk if they move further into Ukraine.” Jake Sullivan, US National Security Adviser in 2022
“The pipeline must be stopped and the only way to prevent its completion is to use all the tools available to do that,” Senator Ted Cruz in 2022.
“There will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” President Joe Biden, standing next to German chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022.
“I want to be very clear: If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for policy.
After the Nord Stream — 2 was sabotaged, the former Polich foreign minister Radek Sikorsky tweeted: “Thank you, USA.”
The very next day, leaders from Poland, Norway and Denmark were present to open the new Norway-Poland Baltic pipeline as an alternative to the Nord Stream.
And then as already quoted: Nuland. “I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
What else do people want: A signed letter of admission by the White House???
You could add also that since Nordstream II passed close to Danish and Swedish maritime borders, that the governments of Denmark and Sweden had to have known who was involved in the sabotage and which countries they were from. So Denmark and Sweden become complicit in the sabotage as passive observers.
Do you not think that if the Danish and Swedish pipeline cleanup diving teams had found anything, like a piece of metal from an explosive munition, that they could have pinned on the Russians that it would have been on the front pages of the papers within days, if not hours?
Also, the ‘new’ pipeline from Denmark to Poland carrying Norwegian gas had little to no net effect on supplies into the EU as it was a branch off an existing pipeline in the North Sea through Denmark. In effect it enabled the Poles to stop paying transit fees to Holland and Germany and made sure they got their gas. It was also much smaller, carrying I think from memory 1/6 of NS1 let alone NS2.
The next interesting date for Russian pipeline gas is the 31st of this month. This is the date that the current, still pumping hard through the Ukrainian warzone, gas supply contracts with EU countries expire. Ukraine earns, and Russia is still paying them (its a strange war) something like $1B a year in transit fees. The Ukrainians have said a couple of months ago that they will not be extending the contract. Whether the US/EU will allow them to walk away from that desperately needed money is yet to be seen. Let alone cutting that irreplaceable gas from eastern Europe at the start of what could be a colder than average winter.
Forget the idea that the EU has fully sanctioned Russian gas. Spain is buying more Russian LNG than last year, I doubt they are alone.
JohninMK
the 31st is indeed an interesting date.
LNG from RU is in fact on high levels still.
Just today German daily Berliner Zeitung on the LNG topic:
“(…)
By comparison, in 2019 the USA had only exported 14.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas exported to Europe as liquefied natural gas, or LNG. In the pre-war year 2021, the volumes had already risen to 22.2 billion cubic meters and exploded to 56 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2022. Russia is also benefiting considerably: in 2021 as a whole, the country delivered 13.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas to the EU as LNG; in the first nine months of this year alone, 17.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas were shipped to Europe in liquefied form.
In Germany, direct imports of LNG via the three finished import terminals in Wilhelmshaven, Lubmin and Brunsbüttel, according to data from the Federal Network Agency, with a current share of just under eight percent, play a significantly smaller role than pipeline exports from Norway, for example. However, 27 and 18 percent of imports flow from Norway and Belgium respectively, which in turn are the largest consumers of LNG from the USA, but also from Russia: The bottom line is that some of the liquefied natural gas is only sold on to Germany at a higher price.
(…)”.
Prickly Pears
Why a gang of “renegade” Ukrainians?
Could it not have been gang of completely banal govt-friendly Ukrainians or even a gang of Ukrainian special forces?
Just askin’, mind you! 🙂
“On the other hand the Danish navy photographed the 4,500 ton Russian salvage ship SS-750 in the area four days previously.”
The most obvious explanation of this (not to you, of course) is that the Russians had got wind of what was going on – such things are very hard to keep completely secret, as subsequent events proved – and were checking to see if they could find anything that looked suspicious. By your reasoning, if a concerned citizen calls the police and the police come and find nothing suspicious, but subsequently it is found that a robbery took place, the prime suspect must be the police: they were there just before it happened, after all.
the USS Kersarge, an aircraft assault ship, was anchored off the island where the pipeline passed; after taking part in the summer NATO excercise, it stayed for week before going back to the States. This ship had the equipment and the expertise to plant the explosives.
Gas pipelines are not empty and Nordstream 2 was pressurised with gas. It is a feature of being underwater that the gas pressure inside the pipe is vital to the integrity of the pipeline withstanding external pressure
I know Ukrainian responsibility has become the settled official line but it is so much less credible than the US-Norwegian collaboration detailed by Seymour Hersh. Given it is their approved story though you are right to ask, since nobody else seems to be, why are Germans still jumping high to Zelensky’s tune? Are there any opposition parties, public figures or sections of the population voicing this glaringly obvious question, or even asking it privately?
thanks you for your all inclusive article of Mr. Scholz and his financial allures, Hans, very much appreciated….not to speak of the unspeakable NS2 terrorism.
Even my friend of 40 years had swallowed the lie that the Russian shot themselves in both feet, never mind the prediction by Biden a year earlier when he said that NS2 will not be allowed to deliver gas. The US is making immense profits with their fracked gas.
A NATO country destabilising the economy of another NATO country, you could not make it up, but it happened.
nevermind, “A NATO country destabilising the economy of another NATO country, you could not make it up, but it happened”
Yes it did happen, but surely you understand this is just business, nothing personnel [as the mafia might say].
The US regards Germany as a big competitor and as any good business man might say, we must eliminate the competition.
The policy of NATO has been in the words of Lord Ismay Sec Gen of NATO who was the biggest advocate of the organisation had famously said earlier on in his political career, NATO was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”. From an American perspective Germany was a “made man” but then inexplicably they disobeyed the organisation, our credibility was on the line we had no option. Biden “Blow it”.
Thanks, Hans. Before he became Germany’s Chancellor (head of the federal government) Olaf Scholz was federal finance minister in Angela Merkel’s government. As such he oversaw the department known as Bafin, the office responsible for supervision of financial transactions by German banks and finance companies. In 2020, during Scholz’s term of office, the biggest financial fraud in Germany’s post-WW2 history was uncovered, not by the agency of Bafin or of Scholz, but through investigations carried out by a Financial Times journalist. Wirecard, the highly-regarded and DAX-listed finance company responsible for the fraud, went bust leaving numerous investors with little or nothing of their investment. The company’s boss, Jan Marsalek, is still on the run. There was no suggestion of Bafin or Scholz being aware of or involved in the fraud – it simply demonstrated their total incompetence, which proved to be no obstacle to Scholz gaining even higher office after the following federal election
Warburg and Cum-Ex
Brandenburg Children’s Home
Egon Krenz FdJ
Google Scholz alongside
“it simply demonstrated their total incompetence, which proved to be no obstacle to Scholz gaining even higher office after the following federal election”
Quite the opposite, I would suspect. The more incompetent you are the less likely you are going to question being told what to do.
Thought provoking comment Hans. I have some questions perhaps you can help me with.
– Why has the German political class, with minor exceptions, gone along with Scholz, and accepted that the pipeline sabotage was necessary, and that the outcome was good for Germany (even though it was clearly not) ?
– What of public opinion.. are the German people demanding accountability and transparency on this matter from their leaders?
– Do you think a private deal between the US and German political elite could have been made, to make the economic sabotage more palatable?
– And what of Scholz.. can he survive politically?
My assumption has been that Scholz was forewarned and approved of the destruction the Nordstream pipeline, even though it was an act of war against Germany’s economic interests, and despite a majority of the German people at the time being against any German participation in the Ukraine war.
Combine this with the predictable outcome that the US benefits massively from the event (LNG prices increased dramatically for Germany, who from memory were getting roughly 50% of their gas from Russia). And of course, most of the gas Germany needed was sold by the US.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-regains-tops-global-lng-exporter-spot-first-half-2023-eia-says-2023-09-12/
1. Scholz & friends were clueless and totally unprepared (unlike the Kremlin).
You have to think back to the sudden election euphoria.
Until August 2021 Scholz was no way chancellor. Then unexpected victory. Then the Green stampede flooded the ministries changing everything replacing everybody like there is no tomorrow and no past.
Then however this war happens.
Out of the blue for them.
I know Scholz and his merry men did not count with the RUs in fact going to war. They WERE surprised. This is a simple fact.
That fact alone is a problem. Because they had no back-up plan. Nada.
They were so overwhelmed with their electoral victory. That´s all they had in mind.
Rejoicing.
War? That just did not fit into their plans.
Thats also why Berlin reacted so unprofessionally to the RU/UKR crisis. They were gravely disappointed because it thwarted their plans of doing cool green government and being loved by everyone. Putin fucked up their dream time in office.
2. When big brother Joe came with that “back-up plan” (“do what I tell you or the Russians are going to the Oder-Neisse- line” or: “otherwise I will shoot you in your tiny little kneecaps”) and offered his solution all they could do was follow orders. There was no other plan prepared.
You have to see that much of German policy-making since always happening in regard to the US in geopolitical terms has never been long-term. In fact there is no long-term geopolitical thinking around here fo the big picture.
It never was necessary and never was desired by Washington.
That is also the main reason why there are no independent German think tanks. All these think tanks do is repeat what Washington says. And if they do not parrot Washington they are deprived of the German government´s affection.
There are particular single islands of competence, offices of the ministerial bureaucracy. Like the office for natural gas. Or the office for building highways. Or in regard of industry and engineering. Or the offices responsible for the cultural funding of theatres and orchestras, that function.
And then there are giant corporations that have their own governance and plans. But those are private.
And in between these entitites something happens.
I finally understood this when I heard that even the Kremlin was unsure whether their policies would work or not. But in contrast to Germany Russia had been practicing this kind of emergency planning for decades. They have developed a professionalism in resilience. Which Berlin clearly lacks.
The notion that the EU would manage stuff is of course humbug and a total misunderstanding.
And when the Americans hinted at the fact that they would bomb Nord Stream some might have warned Scholz others would have pointed to Moscow instead and warned him of WWIII.
Lets assume there were a few smart people in the German Secret Intelligence and the Ministry for Energy who would have told Scholz what to expect until the end of 2022.
Those people would have never gotten a shot. Since Scholz couldn´t avert the worst case anyway. Even if he has known beforehand.
So instead he needed plans HE could in fact realize and use under the circumstances. Plans however which were not “start war with the U.S and make peace with RU.” That he would not want to hear. So there was no other meaningful plan. And there was nobody speaking out the truth. Even though everbody knew it. Because it would not make any difference anyway. Why waste time talking about stuff that you cannot change.
After 2 years this has become totally obvious.
ultimate power corrupts.
From a Green friend who was in the delegation at the time when it happened:
Joschkas Greens were teased by the Serbian delegation passing each other in the corridors of Rambouielette about to vote on NATO’s campaign to bomb the Serbs out of Kosovo. The Greens had the option not to support it and many in that delegation did not support such a move.
On passing the Greens the Serb negotiator said to them in a smiling face ‘as the party for peace we expect you to oppose the Bombing’. Joschka replied’ we shall see. After this incident he persuaded the Green delegation to vote for the bombing.
Green politics in Germany has moved 180 degrees from the times when they were founded, listening to Petra Kelly and taking on her environmentally based politics. I myself have listened to her in Hamburg and it was mesmerizing then.
Today’s Greens are tub thumping self servers who have lost all principles, Ms Baebrocks hardline support underlies a history of embellishment and plagiarism of her past career, she studied in London and was appointed by Olaf Scholz – a yes-sayer if there ever was one, she has much in common with Fischer.
As for Joschka, now retired and well off, he was a radical member of the Putzgruppe and a friend of Daniel Cohn Bendit, He was cleaning up after radical actions, he also fought the police on the streets and there are rumors that he was doing work for the Bader Meinhof gang.
He was self-educated as he failed at school and never studied at any university. That he became foreign minister was probably due to his radical character.
Whence active in the Green Party here, I renewed my passport at a time when I was on the list for the EU elections; I got called into the office of the ambassador and we had a little chat about the then-foreign-minister and his lost routes since Petra Kelly.
We agreed to disagree.
Fischer was a Trotskyite as were most Jewish NeoCons before they switched polarity
NeoCon is Trotskyite Permanent Revolution
JACK
Open Letter demanding WMD non-proliferation published 2020
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ican/pages/1712/attachments/original/1600645499/TPNW_Open_Letter_-_English.pdf
co-signed by: Mr. Joschka Fischer
“By claiming protection from nuclear weapons, we are promoting the dangerous and misguided belief that nuclear weapons enhance security. Rather than enabling progress towards a world free of nuclear weapons, we are impeding it and perpetuating nuclear dangers — all for fear of upsetting our allies who cling to these weapons of mass destruction. But friends can and must speak up when friends engage in reckless behavior that puts their lives and ours in peril.”
A man who should never be taken in any way seriously.
Fischer knows only one thing and that´s his career and position in public.
For most of his professional life when in power he was a warmonger. (“Auschwitz never again” when agreeing to bomb the hell out of Serbia).
Iraq War being the only remarkable exception (“Mr. Secretary I am not convinced”).
He is not much more than any ordinary broken clock being right twice a day.
You could, to advantage, read Diana Johnstone’s account of making the acquaintance of Josker Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit in her remarkable book, ‘Circle in the Darkness’. She describes from close knowledge how the German Greens evolved into warmongers, lifting the taboo on treating the Slavic peoples as dangerous and inferior. Fischer was a street fighter anarchist, Cohn-Bendit came from a well-to-do family, ‘a life-long spoiled brat’. The two took control of the Grunen in Frankfurt, never showed any interest in ecology but pursued political power. Too much to recount here but pp 334 forward in the book expose the real Fischer. Scales and eyes come to mind.
You ought not to have made that quip about Kamala Harris.
Agree we should be very respectful of these powerful public officials while they abet a genocide. Probably the most important response that could be made to this piece.
Why?
Because it made your piece easily dismissed by those with an inclination to dismiss it. And in the first paragraph, too….. Doesn’t matter, if you only want to communicate with your fans.
I imagine Mr Murray wants to communicate with everyone who is open-minded and wants to learn. If you call such people “his fans”, so much the worse for you.
Elon Musk : “The Jewish people have been persecuted for thousands of years. Everyone here has seen the massive demonstrations in support of Hamas in every major city in the West. That should be jarring.”
Is that really his take on the protests? If so, how much of an idiot is this guy? Just shows how you can be smart, but also incredibly dumb when it comes to assessing geopolitics and understanding human behaviour. The protests were no more an expression of support for Hamas, than the protests against the Iraq war were demonstrations of support for Saddam Hussein and his sons. Or the anti Vietnam war protests were demonstrations of support for the Vietcong. Musk’s take is almost as bad as US celebrities publishing pictures of destroyed Gaza, replete with captions saying, “praying for Israel”.
Zionism is flypaper to racists.
He seems to be a born-again zionist after he, for some perverse reason, traveled and met wariminal Netanyahu during his genocidal war and learning all the hasbara talking points, what a unwitting fool he is!
Is he really smart though? When I see him in interviews I am amazed how empty-headed he seems to be, he seems to be a narcisst though.
Elon Musk is a wonderful example of why one should never assume that a person who excels in a given field somehow has superior knowledge or insight in a different field.
Which means that Musk might be a genius businessman but an imbecile when it comes to, say, international relations.
It also means, in, my opinion, that one should not pay too much attention (at least, not until one has had a good think for oneself) when someone starts pontificating and prognosticating in a field other than that of his own expertise.
“Is that really his take on the protests? If so, how much of an idiot is this guy? ”
He’s not an idiot, just someone who, it appears has been brought up in belief that you are either for us or against us, thus, because the marches wern’t against Hamas, they must have been for Hamas. No other option is possible.
Oh Jesus, have you seen anything more ridiculous?
Video of Elon Musk promises to wear a symbol of Gaza hostages
https://twitter.com/Ostrov_A/status/1731160849631375861
As I said before, this is born-again zionist, he have seen the light!
“The war machine controls the people, they do not control the war machine.”
Not only that – the war machine has been attacking its ‘own’ populations for decades. They see us as much of a threat to their power and privilege as they do Russia and China, perhaps much more so. I’d go as far to say they hate us.
This is why I really do mean it when I say that ‘we’ are all Palestinians to ‘them’.
Watching them send half a million young Ukrainians to a pointless and needless death should have taught you that if you did not know it already. But there was a long list of countries they destroyed before getting to mainland Europe.
The migrant crisis is not a crisis in the true sense; it is a deliberate and multi-fronted attack on these countries and on Europe. Everything they have done from killing Gaddafi, to destroying Iraq, Libya, to creating super scary monster killers ISIS to ravage Iraq and Syria driving millions out in fear, to destroying Ukraine… has been designed amongst other things to cause a migrant ‘crisis’.
These people are Evil. Evil is what evil does and we can all see it now plain as day.
Erdogan this morning saying Netanyahu should be tried for war crimes like Milosevic.
But it seems Erdogan’s Turkey doesn’t really prosecute its own military criminals, as detailed in this research paper last year
TURKISH STATE CRIMINALITY AGAINST KURDS AND VICTIMIZATION THROUGH IMPUNITY
https://www.jstor.org/stable/48706340
State Crime Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2
(mentions Diyarbakır, which from another source is the country’s unofficial Kurdish capital of about two million people, with a history of bloody resistance and also a notorious torture prison now being turned into a ‘museum of shame’ (kurdish) or ‘cultural centre’ (Erdogan)
thx
All that presumes Turkish criminality, which you’re being quite inventive about. Kurds have changed territory frequently in history – hard to say one territory belongs to them and another doesn’t. All of this that you mention is of course hasbara intended to weaken the opponents of Israel, that’s why you bring it up.
Inventive about, what? It’s university-based research by a lawyer in a peer-reviewed international journal? http://statecrime.org/journal/
You made that point about territories before and I quoted Middle East historian William F. Tucker “It should be emphasized that they have resided in a fairly compact and homogenous fashion in Kurdistan since ancient times”? I imagine Craig Murray could know more on that…
The state crimes article quotes a Kurdish lady “My ancestors lived here for 1000 years but we are now terrorists and we are refugees in our own country. The investigation file for the killing of my brother has been waiting in the Beykoz courthouse. It has been 24 years but there is not the slightest progress in the case. Every time we visit the courthouse there is another prosecutor and they keep saying they have to read the file”
Your assumption of debating tactic happens to be wrong. I have zero connection to Israel or Jewish causes. I do have a personal connection to this Kurdish comparison.
Don’t be silly. University peer-reviewed research frequently comes up with conclusions based on bigoted prejudices. The name of the journal itself demonstrates that it deals with those who have an interest in accusing someone else. Kurds have a lot of imagination, or at least did when they were being heavily pushed by the US. The Kurdish lady is just expressing her own emotional view of her past, not historical facts. Kurds have calmed down since they began to realise that, as who said it, to be an enemy of the US is grave, to be a friend is fatal. Only émigré Kurds haven’t learnt this yet, as you claim to be.
Don’t be silly? What are you rudely referring to?
Why did you interpret my mention of a personal connection, as a claim that I’m Kurdish?
I don’t understand what your claim is about ‘imagination’. I don’t understand why you seem anti-Israel re Palestinians but pro-Turkey re Kurdish?
Of course academia can be an ivory tower, sources have to be balanced out.
https://www.yalejournal.org/publications/voices-from-afrin-first-hand-accounts-of-turkish-crimes-against-the-kurds-and-policy-proposals-from-those-affected (2021)
…
“The UN Report provides evidence that Turkish backed forces are imprisoning and torturing Kurdish civilians on the basis of being Kurdish, which constitutes persecution. … To date, Afrin is now less than 40 percent Kurdish, a dramatic reduction from over 97 percent Kurdish ”
“While this piece focused on crimes against humanity, it is important to note that these events could be analyzed under the crime of genocide per the Rome Statute given the ethnic cleansing and deportation of the Kurds, and there are a plethora of war crimes to be documented and analyzed as well, such as the pillaging of Afrin’s resources, or the destruction of cultural heritage.”
Btw the lady I mentioned I realised was a man, mixed it up in the context of the Saturday Mothers, a group who would meet at Galatasaray square (I guess that’s near the football team?) to sit silently in protest at the disappearances. Though apparently even that’s now been banned, regardless of constitutional rights.
GA
You quote academic work, which sounds openly politically committed to being anti-Turkish. Such work finds publication easily. It doesn’t mean that it is true in any way. That’s why it is silly to quote it as some kind of proof. The US pushed Kurdish independence for a long time, since 2003 continuously in different ways. It’s been nearly fatal for the Kurds. At least in Syria, it would have been much better for them to do a deal with Asad, as they wanted, but the US stopped that, and pushed them towards independence, which few wanted. It is not surprising that Turkey was upset. Don’t forget that the US had its own interests in keeping the war going, and breaking up the Damascus regime, so fake war crime accusations are par for the course.
We are approaching the apex of the Orwellian nightmare of 1984
As the tyrants proceed with their plans for global pharmaceutical extermination, are now trying to normalize ethnic cleansing and Genocide.
Under the guise of “political correctness” even those medias which are in theory denouncing the crimes, with their trying to give explanations and reason to the atrocities committed by the monstrous apartheid regime, they are actually actively working as damage control for the very same war criminals which are committing the worst atrocities ever conceived.
At the same time, they are also feeding the process of normalization of horrors and Genocide.
What is happening in Gaza is in effect a textbook GENOCIDE, of the scope you have no yet idea of.
People are being turned into dust, by carpet bombing of urban areas, so that no bodies or evidences can be found.
I posted some of the undeniable evidences on my latest letter.
https://mywisdom.substack.com/p/safe-zones
Time to face the fact, the genocide is not happening just in Gaza, this is a war on humanity and humanity is going to have to fight back.
Thank you for sharing Craig
Quite correct. Have people begun to understand that if you slaughter women and children there can be almost no procreation? That is genocide. In Ukraine, for different reasons, population research shows that the largest group of residents are women over 65. Add to this the decimation of young men, with the population now more or less halved as a result of emigration and death. Rebuilding Ukraine is almost impossible.
Youtube truth engines:
George Galloway
Judge Napolitano
Scott Ritter
New Atlas Brian Berletic
etc etc.
The MSM is bankrupt, fully captured by oligarchs and State.
“Youtube truth engines:”
There are no “truth engines”. The truth, like gold, is not something that can simply be picked up on the street. It has to be worked for. Outside your personal experience, the truth is only available by reading all sources and comparing them with each other and with a scale of probability that they represent the real world.
I am talking good percentages. If the issues of COVID, climate change, Ukraine, Gaza etc have an ‘honest reporting’s score of about 10% on Mainstream Media (MSM), the above channels are more like 80-90%.
Berletic quotes all his sources after his broadcasts.
Napolitano asks the same set of questions of his four separate guests on Mondays to gather their expert opinions on a topic.
Galloway had a guy called Craig Murray on his show to test his understanding of the current situation we find ourselves in.
It’s not all ‘narrative’ and ‘talking points’ controlled by WEF / MSM. So time to find your own sources and draw open the curtains on your Overton Window.
If you don’t think that everyone has their prejudices and therefore everyone’s viewpoint is biased, to a greater of lesser degree, you’re definitely not a sceptical SOB. That’s what sceptical means, question everything.
“Galloway had a guy called Craig Murray on his show to test his understanding of the current situation we find ourselves in.”
Our host’s viewpoints on a variety of matters are not mine. I disagree with him on a number of topics and think that he, like all of us, is misled by his prejudices on them. That doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s right on other topics, just that like any other source, I don’t consider him a fount of unblemished truth.
There should be a ‘Human behaviour Law’ that encapsulates your statement. Like everyone, left or right, you worry that I, an adult human being, will be captured by one voice or a collection of voices on one side or another. I see that kind of comment on all online fora.
I’m going to call it the ‘Mother Hen Fallacy’.
You are concerned about my mind being captured by potentially tainted news sources. Are you really suggesting I should just stick with the BBC et al.?
If I told you I could list several biases of each the YouTubers I just listed, would that make you feel better? If I told you that at least one of those speakers had a criminal record, does that mean his known and expert opinion on other matters should be discounted? If I listed occasions where the speakers admit their own biases, or admit that in some areas their knowledge is lacking or inexpert, is that a PRO or a CON, in your estimation?
What if I told you that I sought out other forms of information online BECAUSE the MSM narrative was so self-contradictory, patronising, illogical and in the case of Gaza, generates cognitive dissonance due to the justification of Israel atrocities as we watch women and babies dragged from ruined buildings? I suspect 90% of the UK (other than sociopaths, psychopaths, and politicians) watching MSM news bulletins are suffering that dissonance.
Finally, since you don’t know what competences, experience or knowledge I have, you might be worrying about the wrong things on my behalf.
You should do your ‘bit’ and offer them a starter-list of places to see alternative news. And try to manage better your ‘Mother Hen’ impulses.
What are you going on about? Just look up the meaning of “sceptical” in any good dictionary.
Only if by ‘truthengines’ you mean ‘pro-Russian propagandists”. Just because someone tells you what you want to hear doesn’t make it the truth.
Read my reply to Bayard above, before you reach that conclusion.
Now to your point, let’s examine some statements from the MSM (BBC SKY DAILY TELEGRAPH etc.). The cognitive dissonance forced on me by their inconsistent ‘narrative / propaganda’.
MSM Meme 1 (cf. Von Der Leyen speech)
The Russian Army is a joke. They will be fighting with shovels. They will have to steal the control circuits from washing machines to make missiles. The army is staffed by drunken, undisciplined, poorly trained criminals and conscripts. Their leadership is incompetent and wasteful. As soon as the Ukraine summer offensive starts they will run away.
MSM Meme 2 (Telegraph, BBC)
Evil Putin will use his army to conquer Ukraine and then not stop until he reaches the English Channel.
ME: Those two memes contradict each other. They both can’t be true. And indeed they both look false. MEME 2 would require 2-3 million men. I need to look elsewhere to find out what is really going on. The MSM cannot be trusted on this topic.
Hence my original post.
Now the MSM is coming clean:
Just yesterday, the WSJ reported through a huge 2 part article that US/UK officers war-gamed the Ukraine summer offensive using their advanced gaming tools. Even a fully equipped 9 brigade force, however heavily armoured they were, would not penetrate the echelon Surovikin defence, UNLESS MEME 1 was true. They drank their own Kool-Aid, and the MSM then echoed the message that Ukrainian victory was assured.
It looks like you’re still drinking the same Kool-Aid.
For most other western observers, the drink has acquired a rather sour taste.
Disproportionate responses destroy all reasoning. May be it’ll take Dimona, as well as Haifa and Golan. Numbers mean nothing either. Searching ‘1400 civilian victims’, I found that the correct reference for 1400 victims was on the Great March of Return 2018-2019 when that number was of those who had three to five bullet wounds from IDefence force snipers firing through the fence. Numbers!
I noticed The Guardian today launched a vicious attack on the civil nuclear sector by circulating overblown concerns about, you guessed it, Chinese and Russian ‘affiliated’ hackers targetting Sellafield. The language used throughout the article to describe one of Europe’s most advanced nuclear facilities was dripping with vitriol throughout.
One of the small good news stories of the week was the COP28 agreement to triple nuclear power generation. If we have any hope at all of reaching net zero and reversing climate change before its effects become permanent, nuclear will have a large role to play. It is the only low-emissions source of power generation that can scale to meet global energy demands which are still rising. Renewables are great, but the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Nuclear is also relatively affordable per generated megawatt (the capex costs are high, but SMRs look set to address this) and provides strong energy security for countries who can bring most of the fuel process in-house (like the UK). So it’s fantastic that political momentum is finally returning to the industry.
All of which noble sentiment the Graun basically gave two fingers to with their concerted outpouring of propaganda today. Oil and gas executives and shareholders would have been punching the air with glee as they saw this ostensibly progressive organ come out to bat for more burning of fossil fuels, further toasting of the environment and a retrenchment of the status quo – and their position at the trough. A non-zero number of lives will have been affected and non-zero amount of atmospheric warming will be attributable to the actions of these snakes. Dismal, dismal, dismal.
“Dismal, dismal, dismal.”
It’s a lot more cheerful when you realise that the whole anthropogenic global warming idea has no foundation in physics and arises from a misrepresentation of coincidence as causality.
except every major physics body says the science is solid, but never mind that.
I agree.
The narrative is only underpinned by three ‘surveys’ of scientific opinion, run and analysed by self-confessed green activists.
The science requires proof. If there was hard proof, that scientific paper would be the most referenced document in recent Human History.
There is strong support from a number of predictions which have been borne out and continue to be borne out. if there was an alternate theory of why climate change is happening it would be the most referenced document in recent human history, massively publicised by the fossil fuel industry. But the fossil fuel industry does not want to finance research because they know it would not support an alternative theory. That is because their own scientists warned them about the dangers of climate change back in the 70s and 80s. So they turned to propaganda instead, and here we are. There is not one major scientific organization that denies the basic science here. I think even the association of petroleum geologists have finally given up.
B: “… the whole anthropogenic global warming idea has no foundation in physics … “
Says our resident hit-and-run shy climate denialist before running away.
There’s even a thread just for denialists who get all bashful when it comes to actually discussing their frequent assertions – if Bayard ever plucks up the courage, s/he can give it a go:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/forums/topic/climate-change-denialists-who-get-all-shy/
Oh do give it a rest, you know the mods don’t like it.
A cowardly answer, not untypical of you climate denialists, terrified of discussing the very point you keep slyly making.
Nuclear is the only viable ‘green’ energy source, if we want to move away from fossil fuels. The problem is that bureaucratic incompetence means that small Nuclear, SMRs, will take, at least, five to ten years to develop and deliver, whilst big nuclear, Sellafield, will take, at least, 20 to 25 years to develop and deliver. The problems we have are here today, so nuclear is not going to help for a long, long time. The COP agreements are hot air, most of us won’t see anything helpful in our lifetime. So in the meantime we need to keep what we have (coal, gas, nuclear) going for a couple more decades. Otherwise it’s guaranteed lights out. Unreliables like wind and solar will never supply more than 8% of our power needs – it’s physics Jim ! We’ve let a bunch of morons paddle us up sh*t creek and the future is not pretty.
I don’t disagree, we can’t shed fossil fuels overnight. But that only underscores the imperative to start putting a long term strategy into place as soon as possible. To that end we need to start turning the tanker today, which is why political momentum does matter. China and South Korea are showing that it can yield results. It’s a rare piece of infrastructure that doesn’t require a lot of patience and vision to deliver, but our societies didn’t arise out of nowhere: we’ve done it before, and can again.
“Nuclear is the only viable ‘green’ energy source, if we want to move away from fossil fuels.”
Just how “green” is an energy source that produces waste that is impossible to dispose of permanently and safely? Mind you, I hear that a new dumping ground will soon be opening in Ukraine. The future is not nuclear, unless you are talking about nuclear fusion. Even then all nuclear power of any type can produce is electricity which runs up against the energy density problems that we face today, with no breakthrough in sight.
The nuclear waste issue is totally overhyped. Most waste is low level and the amount of high level waste is small and can be processed and stored until safe – unlike micro plastic waste.
Meanwhile.
“A high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear power plant (NPP) has officially started commercial operation in the Chinese province of Shandong, the National Energy Administration (NEA) announced on Wednesday. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), innovative reactors produce up to 70 times more energy, increase the sustainability of nuclear power, and help reduce the volume, toxicity, and lifespan of radioactive waste. In December 2012, the Shidaowan project was officially launched with the first power being generated nine years later. China ranks third in nuclear power generation after France and the US, according to the IAEA, and is expected to lead the world in installed nuclear power capacity by 2030.”
While the west talks, China acts.
— https://www.rt.com/news/588615-china-fourth-generation-nuclear-plant/
“and can be processed and stored until safe”
Something that has to be stored for hundreds of years, during which it is unsafe, until it is safe, is hardly something you want to be making more of. What could possibly go wrong in the meantime?
B: “What could possibly go wrong in the meantime?”
How about pumping hundreds of gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the meantime instead?
Only, being a climate change denialist, you think that’s just fine of course. What difference could it possibly make? etc etc.
But back on the real world, outside the desperate imagination of said denialists, pumping scores of gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere every single year is actually having a significant and disastrous effect.
Who could have possibly thunk it? (Apart from people who actually research the subject and/or bother to honestly study it, naturally)
I’ve heard some wild theories, but the idea that a gas we all manufacture in our own bodies is as poisonous as nuclear waste, is up there with the battiest.
Nuclear isn’t the only viable source of green energy for the UK (or the wider world), Stevie. Provided you build electrolysis plants and store energy as hydrogen, there’s more than enough space for sufficient wind turbines in the UK sector of the North Sea, or even solar panels in southern England. Should renewables never supply more than 8% of our energy needs, it will be down to politics, not physics.
If we do decide to go down the nuclear route, big nuclear, using tried and tested designs like PWR, is generally better than small nuclear due to economies of scale in both time and money. Oh and Sellafield is a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility (mainly), not a nuclear power station.
Realistically, the future of renewable energy lies in the hot countries of this world, of which the UK is not one.
Yup. It’s existential.
People just need to pick their sides.
The Cable Streets are calling.
We thrash them again.
Or we end up in their fascist utopia.
The kids have to wake up.
From their wokeness.
Too late for their parents now.
The idiots.
Germany would like the world to believe they have changed since supporting the nazis. They haven’t. Their attitude to the oppressed and minorities is still the same. Supporting Israel against the Palestinians to show somehow they have ditched anti semitism is a flawed exercised. All they have done is replaced their vile sentiments towards Jews onto Palestinians.
Germans only got away with reinventing themselves as militant anti-racists because it served US interests in the middle east. it was tolerated because it helped whitewash a crude settler-colonial apartheid regime.
Very crude assertion devoid of nuance or realism.
When you say “Germany” you of course mean “West Germany”. The GDR never accepted the narrative the US instilled in the Western Zone. In fact SMAD repealed Nazi Era legislation on forced sterilisation but Western Zones did not. If you stopped seeing the place through your “Western-indoctrinated viewpoint” you would know Germany is not one but two countries – the former GDR population is much more grounded in reality than the “Wessies”
The Holocaust Industry is de rigeur in Western societies formed by US Occupation (and UK was occupied from May 1941 when US started scouting for bases)………..it is not elsewhere.
Germany has a problem with diversity of views – it needs adherence to a doctrinal truth. Juergen Habermass, supposed “philosopher” in Germany uttered an inane statement excusing Israel’s behaviour as if it were sanctified by what Germany had done to Jews in some prior era.
This is so bonkers as to require pillorying – it simply exonerates German atrocities by letting Israel undermine condemnation of German war crimes through repetition of them – with sanctification from 3 of the 4 Occupying Powers – France, US, UK – and puts USSR/Russia on the moral high ground. It further reveals just how far US military structures were infected through “The Halder Project” and the employment of senior Wehrmacht Command in US military post-1945.
German “elites” especially Greens are paid tools of US. “The Atlantik Bruecke” is one of those agencies of US influence over a deracinated political class so many of whom are university dropouts. Germany is a Party Dictatorship where plum jobs go to the cadres and promotion in teaching or judiciary depends on party cards……..the narrative is the Catechism – chanted even if unbelieved.
The distance between Party and People is far greater in Germany than in UK – Party List System cuts any links to the constituency and Germany is distinctly hollow the it comes to representation
Peter Mo
Indeed, after this war Germany will have a second Guilt to carry on their shoulders. Of course they will deny any complicity, perhaps even banning any mention of israeli crimes.
Obviously germans have shielded themselves from what is really going on in Gaza, because if they actually opened their eyes they would see that Israel commit the same sickening, depraved fascist violence Germany once themselves carried out, just imagine if the german television would air videos like these:
Video of israelis urinating and kicking naked dead(?) palestnians
https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelWarVideoReport/comments/1781d6f/israelis_pissing_on_naked_palestinians_dead_bodies/
Video from last night, bloody, dead israeli children killed after Israel strike school
https://nitter.net/ashoswai/status/1731949590721569149#m
Back in WW2 many germans (and the world in total) could blame that they did not know what the nazis was up to because of the sparse information/news, but today we have a genocide going on in front of our eyes in real time, no one can claim they did not know what Israel have did past months. Silence is complicity especially if you provide the arms, bullets to the culprit like the german state.
Adding to that it is very dystopian that no one, especially not the “rule-based-west” talk about international law anymore; even worse, they deny that any crimes are being committed, as far as Israel is concerned.
…so to hear Olaf Scholz declare that “Israel is a democratic state guided by very humanitarian principles, so we can be certain that the Israeli army will respect the rules that arise from international law in everything it does,” makes you wonder whether the German chancellor actually believes such nonsense, or in fact owns a television
https://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/90891
In established democracies Parliament votes monies for specific budgets and only Defence has „Virement“ or the ability to shift spending between purposes
Germany has been creating Unconsolidated Debt Pools as if they were Assets or „Sondervermögen“ with no Sinking Fund to repay the debt
In total around €870 billion is hidden here plus €750 billion at EU level
Habeck wanted a €260 billion fund to subsidise energy prices exploding because of his policies……he thought Merkel‘s €60 billion COVID Pot could be re-purposed
In the view of the Court whose judges had been invited to dinner with the government before the ruling !!!!!!!
This undermines parliamentary democracy which is patently obvious
They may have got Kamala off the bottle long enough to try and gild the genocide. But a day later Hillary has roared back promoting a giant lie about mass rape in order to justify intensifying the slaughter.
It’s the same unscrupulous lie she used to justify regime change in Libya, so the Israelis knew there would be nobody more willing to promote it for them.
https://twitter.com/NeriaKraus/status/1731728607322484801
In the Harmsworth “Daily Liar” appears exactly the same claim but this time with regard to Russian troops……
It is particularly funny in that Russian troops have little direct contact with enemy forces in an artillery war…….and in the case of Hamas their task was to capture live hostages before the Hannibal Directive incinerated them
The latest Big Lie of mass rape on October 7 was methodically debunked last night in an Electronic Intifada Livecast.
https://youtu.be/pMqRK5LpGy4
Anthony, thx
that was solid.
German papers writing currently about that very topic. I have yet to read.
But if that´s the same stuff I send them the link.
German daily Berliner Zeitung staff had a major internal discussion recently after many readers had complained.
So people can exert some influence.
But, but, the Israeli state said it happened, and they wouldn’t lie would they ?
Not to mention that released Israeli hostages are forbidden from telling what happened to them.
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/12/05/israeli-captives-confirms-hostages-killed-israeli-fire/
There are signs at least some traders knew in advance about the attacks on Oct 7.
At the beginning of October, there was a huge spike in short-selling Israeli stocks – on Oct 2. They pay a fee to borrow shares in a company and then sell them in the hope of buying them back at a lower price – the difference being their profit. The profits from this short-selling were “above $100m” according to those researching the matter.
Short-selling is a particularly obnoxious practice, allowing corrupt elites to profit from their covert operations.
Another piece of Israel related news. Human rights organisations have launched a legal challenge against The Netherlands for breaching its obligations under international humanitarian law by providing parts for Israeli F-35 war planes. The UK could be similarly complicit. Absolutely staggering that the Labour party, led by a human rights lawyer, alongside another ‘human rights’ lawyer, Emily Thornberry, is wholly disinterested in pursuing information on the UK’s involvement, to see if it’s compatible with int. humanitarian law. Grant Shapps became Defence Secretary in September, Shapps is the first Jewish defence secretary for nearly three decades after Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Aside from providing munitions, there have been reports the UK has special forces on the ground and its spy planes are conducting reconnaissance and targeting assistance.
Netherlands accused of war crimes complicity for Israeli military supplies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHpsCeXu3_c
and you do not find Mrs George Clooney aka Amal Alamuddin of Lebanon ………
Appointed as Special Adviser to the International Criminal Court Prosecutor, Karim Khan QC, on Darfur.[37]
Appointed to the UK Attorney General’s Office Public International Law Panel (Panel C from 2014 to 2019 and Panel B from 2020), a panel of experts in international law called upon to advise and represent the UK in domestic and international courts.[38][39][3]
Appointed as UK Special Envoy on Media Freedom (2019–2020) by the UK Foreign Secretary (2019–2020).[40][3]
Appointed as Deputy Chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom (2019–2021) by Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, former President of the UK Supreme Court.[41][3]
Human Rights Lawyer……….”silence to be less than golden” ?
I don’t expect much from Karim khan KC, but it’d be nice to be surprised.
As Craig mentions, the initial signs aren’t good. He appears to be trying to inappropriately ‘both sides’ this ongoing hell, as if the destruction and loss of life is in any way comparable. When it quite obviously is not.
More worryingly, Israel say the operation may continue for six months. That would take it deep into the US Presidential campaign. With candidates no doubt vying to see who can sound the most pro-Israel. You have to also be cynical of Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland at the US state Dept, and their real intentions here. All three avowed Zionists. They know the Presidential election clock is ticking and how a Trump presidency, is likely to allow Israel to annex Gaza, if Netanyahu so chooses. Time really is of the essence for Gazans and wider Palestine. They need this bombing stopped, and the IDF out of Gaza asap.
Paul Greenwood
I am being childish now, but I just had a fun chat about “NO-Politics please” and thus we resorted to banter about what a dick George Clooney is as he apparently behaves like an emperor in his tiny Italian village. And THEN I realized, where there is a Mr. George Clooney there also is a – as you point out – MRS. George Clooney…which brings back in ALL THE POLITICS into the gossip.
These human rights lawyers, seriously, you find them everywhere, except where human rights are violated.
bad girl
Nonsense. It’s a normal trading activity. If you believe a stock is under-priced, you buy it; if you believe it’s over-priced, you short it. (That’s a slight simplification because the risk profile of the two trades is different.)
What is bad is insider trading – whether on the buy or sell side. The people who shorted some stocks may well have bought stocks which would profit from the war: there’s no essential difference between the two behaviours, both probably triggered by some leak from political or otherwise state-connected sources.
in fact US law allows even shorting in case of terrorist acts but only if the profit is not to the benefit of groups banned in the US as “terrorist”. Then the money would be frozen in the US.
Which Hamas most likely knows. Pulling off that makes limited sense, since probably any US affiliate to Hamas is being closely observed by US law enforcement agencies.
As the attacks apparently were known 1 year in advance outside Hamas (and who know what else will come to light) the number of those who could have used that knowledge to do the trade is potentially pretty large.
Goose quotes Elon Musk above.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/12/dystopia/comment-page-2/#comment-1051340
“The Jewish people have been persecuted for thousands of years. Everyone here has seen the massive demonstrations in support of Hamas in every major city in the West. That should be jarring.”
I’ve already come across this opinion, and to be honest, I don’t understand where the logic is? What is the connection?
Perhaps I don’t understand something, perhaps there is some cultural or historical or linguistic nuance that I am not familiar with?
When reading something in a foreign language, we “decipher” the meanings. And so I analyze this paragraph and break it down into its component parts:
– Jews have been persecuted throughout history
– Mass demonstrations take place in support of Hamas
– that is annoying (*what exactly? support of Hamas, or historical persecution of Jews? maybe, demonstrations? or the fact that the demonstrations are massive? or the fact that they are going in every major city?)
I don’t see how this is connected. Moreover, it seems to me that mass demonstrations are not being held in support of Hamas, but in support of the Palestinians as a people, as a civilian population, demonstrations for a ceasefire, isn’t it?
Well, otherwise, I could “decipher” Musk’s phrase like this:
“In the past, Jews were persecuted (*in Europe). Today we must support the Jews in exterminating the Arab population (*in the Middle East). Those who think otherwise are annoying.”
In other words:
“We’ve done a lot of harm to these poor guys, let’s help them kill other poor guys as a consolation.”
There are no calls for peace in this logic. Only an excuse for violence.
I mean, if the Jews wanted to take revenge for historical persecution, then they should turn their revenge on the Europeans, right? What is happening between Palestinians and Israelis has nothing to do with the thousands of years of persecution of Jews. This is a separate modern conflict and it is about control over the territory.
Musk behaves like someone who has bipolar tendencies.
Telling key advertisers to ‘Go fuck themselves.’ then rowing back at a great rate of knots when he realises his candour has wiped another ten billion off X’s value. His trip to Israel was widely viewed as a cynical exercise, aimed purely at assuaging US Jewish corporate opinion, after another of his outbursts on X. He’s now claiming those marching for the long-suffering Palestinians, for humanity – against the bombing and for a ceasefire – are really marching in celebration of atrocities. Which is as offensive as it is ridiculous.
Musk is just a front-boy for establishment interests and Twitter/X will go the same way as MySpace etc,quicker than we might think.
Goose, in my opinion, bipolar people are sometimes in their depressive and lazy era, and at other times in their ethusiasm and inspiration era. Although the change of these periods is beyond their control, nevertheless, this condition does not affect cognitive abilities.
That is, if there was such a student in my class, I would characterize him/her as ‘disorganized and lacking self-discipline.’
But a student with such logic as Elon Musk I would describe as ‘an idiot’.
Imagine that a student comes up to me:
– Miss, I’m going to kill Ahmed. Please give me a gun.
– Why?
– I don’t like sharing a desk with him.
– But there are no other places in my classroom. Also, it’s you who are the new student in my class, and Ahmed was here earlier. So, you are to respect the rules. Moreover, violence should not be a way to resolve conflicts!
– You have to let me!
– Why?
– My great-grandfather suffered from your great-grandfather, so you owe me.
You see? Not bipolar, but totally mad and also aggressive. In Russian we’ve got a short word for it 🙂 Polite translation must smth like ‘cuckoo’, or ‘the geese flew away’ or ‘his roof was blown off’.
“‘cuckoo’, or ‘the geese flew away’ or ‘his roof was blown off’.”
In the UK we have “a sandwich short of a picnic”, “the stairs don’t reach the attic”, or “the lights are on, but no-one is at home”.
The phrase about an empty house is very poetic. Colorful, artistic, and evoking emotions. Good symbolism, universally understood. High style literature in practical application. Bravo!
” – My great-grandfather suffered from your great-grandfather, so you owe me. ”
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/aug/21/dont-listen-to-the-critics-reparations-for-slavery-will-right-historical-wrongs
Pears, you’ve linked an article on transatlantic slave trade.
Would be nice to know your explanation how it is connected to the topic we discuss.
It relates to your comment about the present generation believing that they’re owed something because of what happened to their ancestors hundreds of years ago. To keep in on topic how do you think Russia would react if Israel demanded compensation for the Tsarist ‘Pogroms’?
We cordially invite you to fuck off – I belive the most probable answer would be.
And so, Tatyana, you’ve rather proved Pears’s point, haven’t you……
Our biosphere is strikingly omitted from our host’s list:
yet it is the most important one of these.
Well, the spheres of direction of war, foreign policy, treaties and established religion have been excluded from popular influence since before Shakespeare’s time (with the odd blip and flip), so this dystopia is nothing new. The USAmerican imperial Presidency takes on much from British theocratic militarised hereditary monarchy, and both are cemented by our weapons of ecocidal devastation.
The pyramids must be turned rightway up, the biospheric base should be above, humans should serve below, and individual humans lowest, instead of this atrocious aggrandisement.
While I very much agree about the need to deal better with great ape hierarchical psychology, I fear your penultimate clause might scare off those who have suffered under totalitarian ideologies that didn’t respect or safeguard individual free persons.
@GreatedApe, even anarchists like Bakunin respected the authority of the natural world. Small children should not be allowed to play with matches lest they burn their house down. Individually and collectively humans have demonstrated much unwisdom, ignorance, destructiveness, cruelty, selfishness, short-termism, frivolity, superficiality and superstition. Political constitutions recognise this by placing constraints on individual and collective will (Will tends to be as overrated as Health is underrated in political systems, or perverted as Health meaning eternal war in Fascism). Humans can be free to do many things that don’t negatively impact our biosphere, the only life support system we have, without being given licence to destroy it.
#biocracynow
(I don’t mean ‘free’ in the neoliberal economic sense. Do you find the concept of neurodiversity useful because Singer coined it from an explicit ecological as well as sociological basis)
@GreatedApe, I notice that some people who like to talk about neurodiversity don’t like to talk about neuroplasticity, despite the evidence from modern brain scanners that there is more of the latter than previously known about. I understand some of the concerns.
Very much agree both important – I’m getting deja vu we had this exchange before but I assume not. Big problem that the Big Pharma inspired narrative is only about neurochemicals, especially in US psych it seems where the grassroots opposition to it is undermined by links to Szasz (who just blamed patients if they didn’t cure themselves from his words of wisdom) and ‘Scientology’.
I’m a Brit babyboomer. As a young man I always thought the Brits were meant to be the good guys and the Russkies were baddies. In 1970, I even bought into the insane “Domino Theory” in the context of The American War against Vietnam.
Oh boy! How wrong can one be!
British-made cluster bomblets have been found in civilian areas of Yemen, dropped from British-made jets flown by British trained pilots.
Incredibly, British armed forces are actively participating in the genocide in Gaza. The Royal Navy has two warships patrolling off the Gazan coast to ensure that no Palestinians can escape by sea from what is the world’s largest concentration camp. They are also tasked with ensuring that no aid (or other cargoes) can be landed in Gaza by sea. They are backed up two large RFA support ships, one of which is also an amphibious attack ship which is equipped with landing craft and a Company of Royal Marines.
Overhead, the Royal Air Force is operating a pair of P8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft. Their task is complete surveillance of the maritime area to the West of Gaza and to provide targeting information for the warships.
Very recently the MoD has admitted that they are also operating Sentinel R1 battlefield surveillance and command and control jets over Gaza and Israel around the clock. These things have been brought out of recent retirement to do that job. The wholly bogus explanation is that these aircraft are “looking for hostages”. Utter bullshit! Synthetic Aperture Radar does produce some startlingly fine-resolution imagery, but I promise you that it cannot differentiate between a Jewish Semitic person and a Palestinian Semitic person. Yes, Arabs are Semitic people too, y’know. Sons of Abraham are also sons of Ibrahim. Same guy. Zionism is indeed bullshit.
It can only identify and locate buildings, vehicles and very large troop concentrations in the open. Of course it cannot differentiate between crowds of civilians and troop concentrations of a ragtag militia such as the Qassam Brigades.
Sentinel’s purpose is to identify ground targets and pass that information on to army units on the ground for the purpose of destroying those targets. It’s very good at that task, but hasn’t been needed since the collapse of the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, so it was retired a couple of years ago.
We – through our armed forces – are actively, not passively, complicit in the current genocide of the Palestinian people. That, to me, is out-fucking-rageous. I’m as angry as Craig Murray must have been when he discovered that the very small occasionally visiting SIS contingent of his embassy were complicit in the torture of abductees. This whole thing is all so wrong.
Yes, it really is possible to militarily occupy a small vanquished nation from the air. Britain did that in Iraq a hundred years ago. Any village which did not pay its taxes, or in any way pissed off The Empire, got ‘the treatment’. First a ring of landmines around the village was laid from the air. Then poison gas bombs were dropped into the village to drive the villagers into the minefields. Winston Churchill reported to Parliament that this was having “an excellent moral effect” (his exact words) on the Arabs. The Officer Commanding the RAF detachment in Mesopotamia at the time was a young Wing Commander Arthur “Bomber” Harris. You may have heard of him. If not, then I recommend a highly detailed and very well researched book ‘The Destruction of Dresden’. There’s a free online copy. There too, the clear intent was mass murder of civilians in order to break the will of a nation.
Can you tell that I’m pissed off?
I’ve only ever been on one street demo in my long life. That was on the Saturday after the outbreak of the grossly illegal Bush/Blair war against Iraq. We marched from Edinburgh’s Regent Road along Princes Street and up Lothian Road to the Meadows. I carried a banner saying NOT IN MY NAME. Around the world that day there were similar demos, and the estimate was that altogether 30,000,000 people participated in such demos. Our procession was led by mounted horses of the then Lothian and Borders Police. Somebody placed little paper American flags onto every lump of the resulting horseshit. It wisnae me, but I did laugh.
Can somebody please tell me exactly when and where is the next planned anti-war demo in Edinburgh? I will be there.
Without it undermining that info about British military involvement, what is the basis for this wording I’ve seen before that Gaza is the world’s largest concentration camp or open-air prison. I understand the population is about 2 million and it’s been under economic blockade and utilities controls and e.g. stone throwers and even the journalists covering them have been murdered. But why is it being called a concentration camp and if it is, how is it the largest given other areas of millions under occupation (actual military outposts and vehicles and inspections within the actual territory)?
concentration camp:
I had a fierce argument with a close friend (Germany!) who said to me, no you can´t say that (he is a smart very left person, but Neo-Nazism and antisemitic speech are the limits for him).
I was thinking about this issue myself before so I could argue over it.
Baruch Kimmerling, apparently the one who invented this analogy, was most likely making the distinction between concentration camp and extermination camp. The original German concentration camps (they did not invent those things) were not meant for systematic extermination.
In fact after they were installed in the early 1930s guards were so brutal that Gestapo gave orders to scale it down. I guess they feared public outcry. And only over the 1930s they increased the level of violence.
Now what would be the difference to the prison, I asked myself as well?
Referring to German prisons at least, those are places where the state cannot just go in and kill you or torture you. In fact there are laws. You are being fed properly. etc.
So Gaza in that respect is worse than a German prison.
If an American, like Chomsky in his 2012 interview with Amy Goodman after his first visit to Gaza, used the word prison, I would assume that could make more sense considering the state of and intention behind the US prison complex. There prisons are designed to demean and brutalize the inmates. And violence is a major aspect of that.
That would have much more in common with Gaza. No necessity to resort to the comparison “concentration camp.”
But it would be good to find Finkelstein´s in-depth commentary on this.
Concentration camps were invented by the British in the Boer War, 1899 -1902.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/concentration-camps-anglo-boer.html
“From 1899 to 1902, the Second Anglo-Boer War was fought in South Africa pitting the British against the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. This war would become the most destructive modern armed conflict in the country and shape the history of the nation. It would also be when the British first used concentration camps.”
https://allthatsinteresting.com/boer-war
“Forty years before the British fought the Nazis, they used history’s first concentration camps to commit genocide during the Boer War.”
So well qualified and experienced to assist in a current genocide, then.
” Concentration camps were invented by the British ”
Not that old chestnut again. Of course all evil has to have come from white British colonialists.
Earliest use, at least in modern times, of concentration camps was in 1896 by the Spanish on Cuba.
https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/reconcentrado.htm
As you see, hundreds of thousands died.
Of course, the camps we kept Italians in during WW2 and the ones that the USA kept Japanese in were not concentration camps. And Gaza is a Mediterranean resort. The jailer and the prisoner may have different viewpoints.
“Forty years before the British fought the Nazis, they used history’s first concentration camps to commit genocide during the Boer War.”
The only thing that the British invented was the name. Nor was the intention to commit genocide, as the name suggests the purpose of the camps was to concentrate the population in a few places, thereby preventing them aiding the Boers with supplies of food. That this led to many of the inmates dying of disease could probably have been foreseen and most likely was not adequately guarded against, however that does not make the deaths a genocide. If the British had wanted to exterminate the Boer families, they could simply have shot them or caused them to be killed, not gone to the trouble of building and staffing camps for them.
“Of course, the camps we kept Italians in during WW2 and the ones that the USA kept Japanese in were not concentration camps. ”
No they weren’t, they were PoW camps, prison camps for housing PoWs, not concentrating the populations of an area of land, which is precisely the purpose of the Gaza Strip.
Bayard
The concentration camps for Japanese mentioned were not POW camps, but where the Japanese-American population from California was imprisoned in 1942. I met a Japanese-American a couple of months ago who told me his parents had been born in such a camp in Idaho.
AG, I followed your lead on the origin of the description. Finkelstein attributed it to Kimmerling, which seemed to be in 2003. I thought it would be in Kimmerling’s book “The Palestinian People – A History” but it didn’t seem to be. There is a chapter “A Palestinian Reservation and the Emergence of Camp Society” which just scanning through includes “Nowhere did Palestinians find more brutal conditions than in the Gaza Strip, the single, tiny part of Palestine remaining in the hands of the Egyptian army after its humiliating defeat in the 1948 war. …. Egyptian government policies and the sentiments of the refugees themselves transformed the Gaza Strip into a closed reservation in the 20 years following the 1948 war. …. Despite the fact that it held the second largest concentration of Palestinians, Gaza would fail to become a center of new Palestinian institution building as a result of Egyptian repression” and mentions Kuwait having the largest concentration of Palestinian refugees.
So I found where it seems to originate – his book Politicide in 2003 on Ariel Sharon.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=TE8oCW2J2F4C&q=Largest+concentration
“The fence around the Gaza strip was completed a long time ago and the strip has become the largest concentration camp ever to exist.”
I assume that’s the 1994
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_barrier
But it’s just mentioned in passing. No source. No definition there about walls, no data there on how it’s the largest.
thx for the info an the time and effort.
I have waited for an answer on the Finkelstein blog to the question whether there was more about the Kimmerling analogy but I doubt I will get an answer. Too much other stuff for Finkelstein going on and his subscriber numbers have jumped from 2000 I think to 17.000 due to this massacre.
So for now your research is the essence available.
p.s. what I am a bit worried about, what will happen once this first generation of historians and scholars that has done this ground-breaking research on Palestine since 1948 won´t be around any more. The political problem won´t have disappeared by then. I just don´t see that. The crucial historic documentation is of the highest order in this conflict. If that knowledgebase is gone the arguments for people who really have no swords only pen might be put in serious jeopardy .
By any definition Gaza is a huge concentration camp. The inmates are not allow to leave and escapers are shot.
There’s a scale drawing showing the Apartheit Wall alongside the Berlin Wall. The Israeli one towers above the German one. It has remotely operated machine gun towers with which to massacre any attempting escapees.
To seaward there is a flotilla of Israeli, British and American warships ready to sink even the tiniest Palestinian craft that attempts to flee. Somehow the Royal Navy is incapable of defending a few miles of Kent and Sussex beach from criminal entrants but it can hermetically seal the Palestinian shore with ease. Funny how that works, innit.
There’s something very contradictory here though. Israel is thought to be trying to drive Gazans out of Gaza, which is the opposite of imprisonment. There were airports there, but I see they’re all inactive for years. But there’s other crossings. So if it’s a prison, who else is the jailer? Egypt with its restrictions on its crossing? Hamas itself, who I read in Bloomberg still occasionally executes Palestinians to set an example for trying to leave? The same article (which was broadly criticizing Israel’s current onslaught) said some of the neighbouring countries blame poverty but Saudi Arabia refuses them refugee status despite currently spending billions on a city it doesn’t need. Which if it’s that Noom line thing then according to a scathing YouTuber analysis it’s an inhumane design anyway.
Hamas are very popular in Gaza. Your Bloomberg article is just what you might expect from the hasbara.
P.s. given another accusation of Jewish propaganda, can I note that the article https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-12/palestinians-can-t-just-leave-gaza-during-israel-hamas-conflict
is by Bobby Ghosh from India who was a journalist in India and then international and then America where he’s become a citizen apparently. He has a popular TED talk about reclaiming the beautiful meaning of the word Jihad
https://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_ghosh_why_global_jihad_is_losing
Minor detail but are you sure they are the retired Sentinel R1s (jets)? The sources I can find say Shadow R1s (the propeller driven planes) which are still in service.
https://socialistworker.co.uk/palestine-2023/british-raf-airforce-will-help-israel-over-gaza/,
https://en.mehrnews.com/news/209211/British-RAF-airforce-will-help-Israel-over-Gaza,
https://www.forces.net/services/raf/british-shadow-r1-being-sent-gaza
and
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/raf-spy-planes-for-gaza-hostages/
I was checking out Talk TV this morning to see what they’re inculcating their viewers with today, and picked up on the fact that in the short clip in relation to Gaza they are showing three – and sometimes two – images for a couple of seconds which, in one case, amounts to a slightly damaged roof, and the other images don’t amount to much more than that. In other words, for anyone who gets their news solely via Talk TV, they would believe that Israel is causing very little damage in Gaza. You have to see it to believe it!
And the latest big lie by Israel – or one of them – has just been exposed by Sky News…… The Israeli ambassador to the UK recently said in a Sky News interview that Palestinians can move to a safe haven in the west by the sea, and then they got hold of footage which shows the area is just waste ground with absolutely nothing there:
Israel Ambassador’s Blatant Lie Caught Out On Sky (6mins 13secs) Novara Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSxf6OCuwII
Craig. Apologies if this query has been raised earlier as I haven’t read all the comments. Are you aware of the report by Electronic Intifada that suggests that many of the Israeli deaths on 7th. October were caused by Israel’s military air and land response to the attack and if so, what is your view ? If true the manipulation of the death toll and its cause by the Israeli Government as the justification for the current massacre in Gaza would be beyond monstrous. It would also indict the USA and UK Government who would surely also be aware of the true nature of the events of 7/10 and would therefore be complicit.
Have you followed Greta Thunberg lately? She came out in defense of the palestinians since the war started and was directly labeled a nazi and the usual libel, even the german branch of her protest movement/organization condemned her for not supporting Israel!
Now, she and some other of her colleagues have written a great op-ed in the Guardian
We won’t stop speaking out about Gaza’s suffering – there is no climate justice without human rights
Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future Sweden
The horrific murders of Israeli civilians by Hamas cannot in any way legitimise Israel’s ongoing war crimes. Genocide is not self-defence, nor is it in any way a proportionate response. It also cannot be ignored that this comes within the broader context of Palestinians having lived under suffocating oppression for decades, in what Amnesty International has defined as an apartheid regime. While all of this alone would be reason enough to comment on the situation, as a Swedish movement, we also have a responsibility to speak up due to Swedish military cooperation with Israeli arms companies, which makes Sweden complicit in Israel’s occupation and mass killing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/05/gaza-climate-justice-human-rights-greta-thunberg
This is how you do it, you do not back down, you do not apologize especially not to racist genocidal apologists that defend killing of children.
Ben-Gurion despised Begin …. compared his rival to the Fuehrer and called the Irgun a ‘Nazi gang’ and ‘Jewish Nazis.’. (Elkins, ‘Legacy of Violence’ 2023 Pp 332-333).Ipsi dixerunt!!!
German end of Thunberg operation is Lisa Neubauer who is Jewish
…however it seemed as if she was forced by MSM to back down after her colleague tweeted stuff that was not allowed…
regardless of what one thinks of them, it is another scandal that these mostly young people are now regarded as a criminal organisation by German law enforcement. I mean this is the worst kind of treachery regarding which party is in the government. What does it tell the others? Keep your head down, study economics, go to a bank and fuck people over.
Jeremy Corbyn asks FCO minister in parliament if UK troops boots are on the ground in Gaza, the minster refuses to answer the question.
https://nitter.net/jeremycorbyn/status/1732016726508769661#m
So that’s a yes, then.
In Ukraine, and in Palestine.
Meanwhile, back in the swamp:
“More than a decade of economic stagnation has left British households 25% poorer than their peers in such countries as France and Germany, according to the latest research, which was published on Monday.”
https://www.rt.com/business/588486-uk-households-poorer-european-peers/
Priorities, priorities.
5 minutes after the genocide ends British politicians will be straight back scolding others on human rights, values, etc. Their fans as always will lap it up and demonize whoever is the latest official demon.
In fact there has been no relenting in British scolding, even as they participate in a genocide. Back in October, hours after Israel blew up a hospital, Britain issued a UN resolution condemning .. China, for human rights abuses .. of Muslims! Back when there were political satirists they would have been too embarrassed to devise such a crass caricature of British politicians. It would have been seen as stretching it too far.
The comments are most illuminating.
Forget the distraction efforts of establishment shills, what do you think of Britain participating in a genocide?
Appalling if it were true but Corbyn should know that the government never comments on the deployment of UK special forces.
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/special-forces-opacity-dangers-for-the-uk/
A few days ago on TV Netanyahu implored media outlets to portray Hamas as sexual monsters. The BBC duly obeyed with this linked article also on TV and radio.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67629181
Now journalistically there are serious flaws with this article.
BBC relies on a Captain Mayan. No explanation who Captain Mayan is.
Nothing is mentioned about the Israeli’s who were killed or maimed by Israeli friendly fire.
No mention that initially 200 killed Hamas fighters were mistaken for Israeli’s.
The rape allegations are third hand and mainly the filmed testimony from one unnamed witness.
The same women is quoted further in the article using flowery graphic language but readers of the article could assume this is another person.
Its not clear when the article was written. Some of it appears to be only a few days after Oct 7th. Several contradictions. Some saying rape and mutilation occurred others saying too early to know.
Altogether a deplorably poor standard of journalism.
Yeah the BBC. Dreadful organisation. Totally controlled by the PTB. You can’t believe a word.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67617920
They are headlining as truth right at this moment very obvious Israeli lies. They are desperate to ennoble this genocide Britain is participating in by any means. It shows yet again that the BBC is an organisation with zero scruples.
…what´s PTB?…
Powers That Be.
It is like a campaign going on where western politicians, media get their talking points directly from AIPAC, the israelis try to appeal to the west with propaganda about rapes of women, a blatant dogwhistling/appeal to the anti-immigration/muslim west:
Hamas blasts Biden for repeating Israel’s allegations of rapes galore and mutilatation of women
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2023/12/06/715879/Hamas-blasts-Biden-for-repeating-Israel%E2%80%99s-blatant-lies
Seems like muslims are not going to take it anymore but I assume Biden do not care since they are not paying him like AIPAC and other similar organizations:
American Muslims vow to ditch Biden in 2024 over his support for Israel
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2023/12/03/715756/US-Biden-2024-Election-Palestine-Israel-Gaza-
Per every unverified claim the MSM, Biden and others make, the more they give green light to Israel to carry out even more senseless killing….and this after 2 months of pure perverse carnage!
One wonder also how much of Biden’s cognitive mental decline is the reason why he support this killing, does he really know what he is doing? Does he really know that Israel have killed some 8000 kids?
Jack, Joe Biden may have declining mental abilities but he has always been a murdering, lying POS, here he is abusing Scott Ritter, after the video Ritter gives Biden both barrels.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH1SI9ufr8
Israel knows a bit about sexual monsters. After all it’s groups of Israeli youths who gang rape (british) tourists in Cyprus as part of their ‘blooding’ before their military service. I guess that makes a nice change for the tourists from the british military who used to provide this service !
“The war machine controls the people, they do not control the war machine.”
“Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him?“
Israel says it will pursue Gazan Palestinians on Lebanese, Turkish and Qatari territory. Israeli security service director’s threat on Israeli national TV https://skwawkbox.org/2023/12/05/israel-says-it-will-pursue-gazan-palestinians-on-lebanese-turkish-and-qatari-territory/
This is incredible, here we have approx 8 million Israelis in a postage stamp sized state threatening the whole of the Islamic world [one and a half billion muslims] including approx 400 million Arabs in the surrounding countries, and what have these countries done, f— all, no oil embargo, no trade embargo, are they waiting to be attacked themselves which is an inevitability, or are they hoping for a peaceful couple of months were they can become the slobbering slaves of Israel/US and hope they will not be turned on next. We shall see.
Speaker: T.E. Lawrence
Sherif Ali, so long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel as you are.
harry law
I can only agree with your disdain for the arab leaders – the only thing they have done is to meet once a month to criticize Israel in feeble terms – wow so brave, what a gusto they have huh sigh…, Israel have 22 arab states/55 islamic states around them, and these s states can’t even lift a finger to actually do something even though there are so many non-military ways they could influence both Israel and the West, they are nothing but complicit actors, apparently they have the same goal as west+Israel+Palestinian Authority, that is, wipe out Hamas and let the corrupt Mahmoud Abbas rule.
The only parties with some kind of heart is Iran; Hezbollah and the Houti movement in Yemen:
Houti leader blast inaction by islamic states on Israel
“Although the Arab-Islamic Summit was an emergency meeting of 57 countries, it did not come up with a position or practical action, and this is shameful and sad,” Houthi said.
“The summit that claimed to represent all Muslims only produced statements with no practical stance. Is this capability of over a billion and a half Muslims?” he added. “Fifty-seven Arab and Islamic countries, with all their … capabilities, came out with a statement that could have been issued by a primary school and by one person.”
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2023/11/14/714606/Yemen-Ansarullah-resistance-movement-Muslim-world-clear-stance-Palestinians-Gaza-Strip
I also wonder where the “arab street” is, one would expect big demonstrations, riots like during the Arab Spring. It seems odd that I as a westerner seems to be more sad and livid than how the arabs in the middle east feel about the palestinians and israeli slaughter.
“complicit actors, apparently they have the same goal as west+Israel+Palestinian Authority, that is, wipe out Hamas and let the corrupt Mahmoud Abbas rule.”
Those who don’t care to be complicit are subject to a great effort at regime change, which so far has been largely successful. Hence the preponderance of those who are complicit.
There already is a trade embargo. Been in place since I was a kid. There’s no meaningful trade, although there are theoretical peace treaties, where Israeli diplomats hide out behind high walls, and the ambassadors now withdrawn since October 7th.
btw I don’t much agree with the Lawrence quote. And normalisation is now dead.
If the normalization is called off, why do not the Arab leaders then announce that move publicly? Well, obviously the normalization is not called off; these corrupt leaders obviously value Israel more than Palestinians.
No need to suck up for the enablers of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Speaker: T.E. Lawrence….
Probably better attributed to David Lean and Peter O’Toole, I’ll have another look but I couldn’t find it anywhere in Seven Pillars.
Pears Morgaine, “Probably better attributed to David Lean and Peter O’Toole,”
Doesn’t matter who said it, it was true, and confirmed by Col. Gaddafi at the Arab League meeting when he accused other Arab states of being more enemies of each other rather than facing its real enemies, like the US. He said the US destroyed Iraq, then hung its leader Saddam Hussein, while other Arabs stood and watched. Any one of us could be next he said. How true and prophetic.
And Bashar Assad was smirking
Professor N Finkelstein had some important things to say in 2008, when he said “There is no way the United States and Israel are going to tolerate any resistance in the Arab world, if you want to pretend it can be avoided you can play that game but serious people, clear-headed people knew there was going to be a war sooner or later, do you think there is not going to be another war? Do you think Israel is going to allow that defeat in 2006? You want to pretend it is Hezbollah that is causing the trouble, no, there will be another war, and the destruction will be ten times worse because Israel is determined with the US to put the Arabs in their place and to keep them in their place”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAGVQF-Kys8
These are prophetic and true words, it is up to the arabs to develop a backbone and resist, or they will be US/Israeli slaves forever.
Untrue words actually. Things are now very different from 2008.
Laguerre, “Untrue words actually. Things are now very different from 2008”
You do not say why they are untrue, nor why things are very different now? Please enlighten.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html
“Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200.″
Then they watched Hamas train for this operation.
Israel response remove guards stop monitoring on weekends move party to border.
Don’t respond for hours then send in attack helicopters to kill everyone.
I guess they could have opened the gates and put a sign ‘free kill zone’ but maybe that was too obvious.
Israel excuse failure of imagination.
Preliminary research from Columbia University and New York University shows bets against the value of Israeli companies spiked in the days before October 7th.
This is 9/11 all over again.
I am not good with this but it seemed as if of interest to people here and sounded rather dystopian.
From Substack “Tom Griffin on intelligence history”, which I just recently subscribed to.
“UK Parliament issues warning over new Whitehall intelligence units
Growth of intelligence community not matched by oversight”
https://intelligencehistory.substack.com/p/uk-parliament-issues-warning-over
“(…)The UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has published two new reports today.
Brexiteers are celebrating the report on international partnerships because of its conclusion that EU withdrawal hasn’t affected intelligence liaison. What’s less clear is how Brexit has affected security in Northern Ireland. Although the Committee asked MI5 director general Ken McCallum about this issue, his answer is redacted.
On the key issue of law and human rights in liaison relationships, the Committee is broadly positive about the current situation, while acknowledging that ‘there must be no complacency. The history of the Agencies’ work with partners on detainee issues has been problematic – at best.’
The ISC’s annual report, also issued today, is more critical of the Government. Announcing its findings, ISC chair Sir Julian Lewis warned that the Government had expanded the number of departments with intelligence and security responsibilites, without expanding the Committee’s oversight remit to match. ‘It is deeply disappointing that effective scrutiny of national security issues is being prevented, in direct contravention of commitments given to Parliament,’ he said.”(…)”
It contains a pdf link to “Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament” on Intern. Partnerhips, 113 pages:
“Presented to Parliament pursuant to sections 3
of the Justice and Security Act 2013
Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 5 December 2023”